There is an JL com called fandom_counts. It did not exist a day and half ago. It now has nearly 19,000 members. You created that. Many of these people knew little or nothing about Dominionist Christianity until today. But your actions have pulled your own covers and made it personal for them.

In other words, you have just recruited an entire army of enemies that did not exist a day ago, some of whom are quite brilliantly insane. So, while you may have achieved a small tactical victory, you have created a significant strategic problem.

And those of us who have been waging war against you all along, we are moving rapidly to exploit this opening you have provided.

We have always been strong supporters of free speech and at the same time we believe deeply that children deserve special protections as well as the victims of violence and hate. We tried to implement a policy that walk that line and we did it poorly, we are all sorry. One could say that no matter what we did we would either be accused of opposing free speech or endangering children but I am sure we should and could have done this much better. I hope you can forgive us and we can regain your trust.

Well, some of the explanations are a tad wanting (the "I like x" bit begs to be thrown out on its ass), but he's a good deal smarter than I would have guessed. I mean, hey, a corporate CEO who actually knew when it was time to issue an apology? That's worth something in my book.

And the more reasonable SixApart is about all this -- even despite their initial freakout -- the more ire and suspicion will be rightly redirected back at the "Warriors For Incest" kooks and their pseudo-moralist ilk.

Hello, everyone. I have noted that we've suddenly gained nearly 100 newcomers over the last evening. I want to welcome you, and ask you to read and heed our Guidelines on our front page. By joining this community, you have agreed to follow them. The moderator team is watchful- we want you to have a good visit.

That said, I want to welcome you here, and hope that you find interesting and enlightening things to learn. This is not a bash or a snark site, but it is critical of Christian extremists. If you're the sort that is sensitive to shining light into the dark corners of your faith, you might not be comfy here. However, if you have some 'how come' questions about your faith and some of its practices that keep being brushed off, we might be able to help you. We have tons of tags and links to explore, and a Wiki for you to join and use, too. There are people of many beliefs here, so be respectful of them.

Read deep, play nice, have a good visit. And, if you would, please introduce yourselves!

I just want to say good job to everybody that helped unearth dirt on WFI, and to the rest of the community for keeping the discussion civil throughout, if only the rest of the internet were like you guys.

It would surprise few people, conservative or progressive, to learn that coverage of the intersection of religion and politics tends to oversimplify both. If this oversimplification occurred to the benefit or detriment of neither side of the political divide, then the weaknesses in coverage of religion would be of only academic interest. But as this study documents, coverage of religion not only overrepresents some voices and underrepresents others, it does so in a way that is consistently advantageous to conservatives.

As in many areas, the decisions journalists make when deciding which voices to include in their stories have serious consequences. What is the picture of religious opinion? Who is a religious leader? Whose views represent important groups of believers? Every time a journalist writes a story, he or she answers these questions by deciding whom to quote and how to characterize their views.

Note: It is so nice that somebody else is saying this. Even if it is a bit late. One of the reasons that these guys can be so sucessfull is that they have learned to manipulate the media. There is a reason WHY Jerry Falwell was on the TV so often: he made himself available. Also, the media, for reasons unknown to me, have bought into the lie that the Fundies are the default form of religious expression, from which all others dirive. That most fundamentalisms are born of the 19th century seems to escape most, if not all. This hands these intellectual parasites more authority than they deserve. It also allows the theocrats to spread the lie that they are "real" Christians, and not a collection of wierdos following a distorted form of the faith.

I was unaware of this issue, but it appears that the sort of malware that people are encountering at the "Warriors for Innocence" site can be used as a way for websites to generate revenue. ziz has a great post about the issue which talks about how websites can use being the vector for infections as a sort of 'affiliate' deal to raise a ton of money -- especially after starting a huge contraversy and being linked to from slashdot, CNet and BoingBoing.

I have very strong feelings about doing anything that makes money for Dominionist groups and those tied for them, and I know other people in this community probably do as well. If you feel that way, it's even more important to use firefox, a strong firewall and to immediately remove any nasties from your machine with a good anti-spyware program or two.

Who else has been struck by the irony of of dominionist anti-pedophile groups when there is so much child abuse up to and including pedophilia in Dominionist circles?

Case after case has surfaced and in group after group I have heard tell of children being beaten, sexually abused, and emotionaly abused in these groups. When this happens, the survivor's accounts are often the tale of the circling of wagons, protecting the perpetrator, and blaming the victim.

It seems to me WFI should follow their own books advice and make sure their own house is in order in regards to pedophilia and incest before they go throwing stones at people who are not even associated with such abominations.

Go here or here to get quick instuctions for cleaning malware spread by WFI. You'll know if you need a clean when you experience a signifigant lag in internet page load time.

I know the excellent belleweather and lihan161051 have covered this topic a bit in posts earlier today, but I thought a quick'n'dirty PSA might help some of the less tech-savvy among us (me included). We know thanks to lihan161051 that the malware jumped to LJ servers at some point, so even if you didn't visit WFI, it's possible you're infected.

Thanks to the excellent catrinella for the links - and for all her hard work on the fannish side of this battle.

..cross posted like a MoFo...and posted here for 'informational purposes'

First off, some Truth in Advertising, something I think we all can agree has been in rather short supply in certain places around here.

I am well known in some sectors of LJ as a lunatic, albeit an articulate and charming one, [modest too] and, if you check my User Page, that is not an entirely undeserved reputation. My personal and political agenda is, by contemporary standards, bizarre and extreme, and bluntly put, scares the crap out of some people. [even scares me some days]

But I am not here to promote that agenda, except in a general and oblique fashion. I am here to talk about our immediate future.

A Caveat: this post contains Politics, Religion, and gack! Economics. Sorry to inflict that upon you, but they are all kind of tied together. It's called Society.

I will do my best to keep this as short and simple as possible. I will provide an interesting pic and some nifty links along the way.

Okay, let me sum up recent events in two ways with a Narrative and a Political format.

Narrative: “Warriors For Innocence” culminated a two month campaign to get SixApart to delete certain journals by contacting SixApart's advertisers and saying “SixApart supports pedophilia”. Hundreds of LJ's, the vast majority of whom were innocent, get mass deleted. The LJ Community raises up and fights back. SixApart backs off...somewhat.

Political: An Extremist Political/Religious Group uses The Pedo Meme in a psychological warfare operation against a Capitalist Entity that provides a Free Speech Forum for profit. In the final phase of the operation, said Group escalates to economic terrorism, triggering a Greed/Fear reaction in said Capitalist Entity that comes at the expense of the Free Speech Rights of their customer base. The customer base responds with its own Psy-Ops and economic counter-terrorism, and said Capitalist Entity's Greed/Fear reaction changes course...for now.

Now here's the punchline. Important as this has been to many of us personally, this was mere a skirmish in a much wider war, ( this war... )

Before the Great LJ Strikeout of 2007, there were a couple of threads where the discussion turned to talking about exactly how we can and should work to thwart the aims of the Dominion.

A few of our members were suggesting forming a 'left-wing militia' or other kinds of violent opposition to them. Needless to say this is not an idea we endorse or recommend... as Sunfell just noted, it's a time to keep cool heads.

But what should we actually *do*? Which forms of action can we take that will be most effective in short and long term?

Big questions - and I know there are a lot of possible answers. This is the thread to discuss them.

We commented last December on a Pagan group in Albemarle County, Va., that took advantage of a Religious Right-sponsored move to open a public school’s “backpack mail” system to religious promotions.

The backlash was swift and harsh when parents received flyers announcing a Pagan holiday celebration at the local Unitarian Universalist congregation. One mother was livid that the school would send home in her child’s backpack anything it did not endorse. A “pagan ritual” is “an educational experience my children don’t need,” she fumed.

“Backpack mail” systems are common in public schools. Albemarle uses it to advertise extra-curricular activities such as children’s theater, summer camps and recreational sports events.

'Faithfully Liberal posted an interview with Eboo Patel, founder of the Interfaith Youth Core. I hadn't heard of either Patel or his group before, so the interview provided a good introduction.

I particularly liked this distinction, from Patel. The "faith line," he says:

... does not separate Muslims from Christians, or Jews from Hindus, but rather religious totalitarians from pluralists. A religious totalitarian is someone who seeks to suffocate those who are different from them. ... A pluralist is someone who seeks to live with people who are different, be enriched by them, and peacefully coexist in the world together.

This talk of living with, of peacefully coexisting, and particularly of being "enriched by" people of other faiths and perspectives would not sit well with many of the fundamentalists in the church and school I attended as a child...'

Pluralism is as good a name as any for the spirit we need to foster, the core concept that keeps this group working and the only solution I can see to a small planet with so many different opinions.

As I'm sure you've all observed, the sort of people drawn to Fundamentalist and Dominionist circles are not exactly the wholesome, morally upright types that they like to present themselves as. In fact, it often seems to be the case, to paraphrase the great comedian Bill Hicks, that the farther you are to the right, the deeper and darker the secrets you're hiding. Anyhow, I came across the following passage in a book about clinical psychopathy called The Emptied Soul: On the Nature of the Psychopath, by Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig, which I think can be neatly applied to the Fundamentalist mindset:

“Individuals approaching the psychopathic extreme are not totally wanting in morality, but they do sense a weakness, an awareness that something is missing, which frightens them. They also suspect that their love is not all that it could or should be. In order to adopt they begin to compensate for these deficiencies [by] becoming morally rigid. Rather than, or perhaps in order to prevent falling into a state of total moral and ethical apathy, they turn compulsively moralistic, championing moral causes for themselves and for others more fanatically than anyone else. These are the people who are always talking about principles, always concerned about “the principle of the master.” They get so lost in principles that they never notice the need for a little milk of human kindness by way of balance. Compensated psychopaths tend to seek out occupations where those with whom they work will help to maintain a moral rigidity, occupations where a strict morality is the order of the day. Therefore we would not be surprised to find large numbers of compensated psychopaths in the so-called helping professions: teaching, psychiatry, the ministry, social work, and the like. It is, for example, difficult for a clergyman to lead a completely immoral life. His profession makes him the moral authority, a representative of Eros in the highest sense of the word, whose task it is to convince others that these values are the ultimate ones. His professional role enables him to shore up his own weak morality and his almost absent sense of eros. Since compensated psychopaths cannot depend upon eros, their egos work out a moral system which is foolproof in any and every situation. The result, as paradoxical as it may seem, is usually a well-developed morality with an emphasis on the ego’s role but woefully lacking in love. Compensated psychopaths continually and at all costs uphold moral conventions, fanatically defending their moral systems. Were they to relax the hold on their moral code, the entire structure might well collapse like a house of cards, revealing their psychopathic nature. It is rather like cooking, a poor cook sticks assiduously to the recipe, while a gifted one can change this and that according to a momentary whim.”